Over the last couple of weeks, we have been exploring light and dark as physical properties of a photograph, lived emotional experiences, and as a metaphor for seeing and not seeing. 

Last week, we explored the idea that both the photographer and the subject have hidden depths and the importance of embracing both the ordinary and the extraordinary (the mundane and the mystery) as we engage in our practice. 

This week we will continue to explore sight and insight, and to rebuild our sight as we continue to expand our ability to take in the fullness of life with all of its complexity and contrast.  

Tom Rankin, in his essay The Cool Radiance of the Obvious, offers us this: 

“Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision. And yet, the photographer is also in a perpetual battle to see beyond and around what he or she has already seen, to bring to their own work a “sovereign vision,” …

Read Tom Rankin’s full essay The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious here: